Architectures for product families

Manufacturing companies increasingly develop product families to offer a large variety of products with limited development and manufacturing costs, This paper asserts that the development of a product family requires product architectures in three domains, defining the required function, technological realisation and the physical realisation, A product architecture separates the stable and the variable aspects of the design. The stable aspects are then integrated to improve the cost-performance ratio, and the variable aspects are developed in a modular way to improve the cost-variety trade-off, The paper supports its arguments through an example. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.